Good faith effort

Two Texas congressmen, one Republican and one Democrat, agree on a crisis plan.

Copyright 2014: Houston Chronicle

Updated 10:58 am, Friday, July 18, 2014

Photo: Eric Gay, POOL

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Detainees sleep at an immigration facility in Brownsville last month, under a policy much different from the one Vietnamese refugees dealt with in the 1970s.

Detainees sleep at an immigration facility in Brownsville last month, under a policy much different from the one Vietnamese refugees dealt with in the 1970s.

Photo: Eric Gay, POOL

Good faith effort

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Having grown accustomed during the past several years to watching lawmakers in Washington bloviate and dither, no matter the issue, we find it refreshing that two Texas congressmen, one a Republican and one a Democrat, are actually grappling with an urgent humanitarian and public policy crisis. Their bill may not get anywhere and it certainly can be improved upon, but they deserve credit for making the effort.

GOP Sen. John Cornyn and Democratic U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar have offered what Cornyn calls "bipartisan, bicameral legislation" that they contend will help solve the crisis of unaccompanied migrant children from Central America showing up at the Rio Grande in vast numbers. Their bill would revise a 2008 law to make it easier to deport those children more quickly to their home countries, primarily Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.

As most Americans now understand, those countries are plagued by criminal gangs, human trafficking and some of the highest murder rates in the world, conditions that are propelling a mass children's exodus. Desperate parents are sending their children on perilous journeys northward, hoping against hope that their children will be safer in the U.S. - if, that is, they make it here.

Cornyn and Cuellar call their bill the Helping Unaccompanied Minors and Alleviating National Emergency act, an awkward label designed to produce the acronym HUMANE. Although we recognize that something needs to be done to deal with the thousands of children showing up on our doorstep, we are concerned whether a key component of the bill will actually be inhumane. Under the Cornyn-Cuellar proposal, we're concerned that immigration judges would not have time to determine whether children are being sent back into life-threatening situations.

Given the current immigration court backlog of about 375,000 deportation cases, it's hard to imagine how an accelerated process guarantees an accurate assessment of each person's situation, even with an extra 40 judges the law calls for. Cornyn told the Chronicle editorial board in a Thursday conference call that 40 is "our best judgment of what would be needed to handle this initial bubble and surge of cases," but he went on to say that the number is not hard and fast.

The bill also includes a "volunteer departure" component that would allow the Central American young people to waive their immigration hearings and be returned to their home countries almost immediately.

"Clearly we have to take care of these children while they're here," the senator said. Most Americans would agree, but sending them back post-haste to what may be certain death is not exactly adequate care.

What we would hope to see from the Cornyn-Cuellar bill, in conjunction with components of the $3.7 billion emergency supplemental funding request from the White House, are resources to provide these children with lawyers and victims' advocates and a reasonable opportunity to state their case. Despite protests from some communities in Texas, California and elsewhere, they also need clean, safe shelter. They are, in fact, innocent children.

The Cornyn-Cuellar bill has its shortcomings, but it's immeasurably better than the proposal by Cornyn's Texas colleague, Ted Cruz, the firebrand freshman senator whose No. 1 priority is deporting all the Dreamers who benefited from Obama's 2012 initiative that allowed them to stay in this country for two years.

As usual, Cruz would rather score political points among the hard-right than to deal constructively with the issue at hand. (By the way, we thought the senator's No. 1 priority was dismantling every single word of Obamacare.)

Cornyn is more than willing to lay a large share of the blame on the president for the current crisis, but beyond the blame he seems willing to seek reasonable solutions.

"We tried to figure a way to come up with a reasonable accommodation for those who make it to the border and for those who have legitimate claims under current law," Cornyn told the Chronicle. "Admittedly, it's overwhelming, because of the numbers, our capacity to deal with this on all levels - detention, public health, providing adequate representation and the like."

We should note that the senior senator from Texas has a history of sabotaging good-faith efforts to reform this nation's immigration laws, but in this case we have to trust that he's making a good-faith effort to deal with the problem. We would encourage his colleagues, Democrats and Republicans, to engage him in the same spirit.